1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a program for printing control processing accompanied by reprinting processing which accompanies accumulation of documents, a recording medium on which the program is stored in a computer-readable state, an information processing apparatus and a printing data processing method.
2. Related Background Art
In recent years, network devices have come into general use. A multiplicity of such devices, e.g., a personal computers (hereinafter referred to as “PC”) and printers are connected on a network. Techniques relating to reprinting in such a network environment are known.
For example, from a patent document 1 (Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2000-194514), a technique is known which comprises forming a virtual spool file through a virtual printer driver, making and storing a virtual document file based on the virtual spool file and providing an instruction to reprint the saved virtual document file. The technique disclosed in the patent document 1 also enables a virtual document file to be edited by predetermined editing processing using a virtual document editor, the results of editing being stored in a state of being contained in the virtual document file and reflected in a print at the time of reprinting.
From a patent document 2 (Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2001-216109), a technique is known which comprises storing in a server an Enhanced Meta-File (EMF) together with data a CAPCAL job description file (including Windows (trademark) job information, Devmode information and output control information) and executing reprinting on the basis of the stored EMF and CAPCAL job files.
However, conventional techniques in which an intermediate file is temporarily formed when print data processing such as distributed printing, substitute printing or the like with respect to a plurality of printer devices and in which a file is formed in a page description language corresponding to each device on the basis of the intermediate file when distributed printing or substitute printing is performed are incapable of management of information including output destination information in a case where document management is performed and data once printed out is printed after afterwards under a predetermined condition. It is supposed that management of information about an output destination is important particularly in document management associable with an output system for distributed printing or substitute printing. In a mode without managing output destination information, a user is required to perform a troublesome operation, e.g., setting of an output destination.
An editing system in which reprinting is performed after performing predetermined editing operations such as layout and output destination setting on printing data temporarily stored. However, there is still substantial room for improvement in such an editing system with respect to efficiently linking the editing system to a distributed printing or substitute printing output system to increase the processing speed of the system at the time of outputting printing results.